Violent crime in the US has declined. Many voters don't want to believe it

Crime in the United States has fallen dramatically since 1993. After a slight increase during the pandemic, violent crime is declining again. In 2023, murders fell by almost 12% compared to the previous year. However, the public refuses to believe it.

This way of thinking is not new. In 23 of 27 Gallup crime surveys conducted since the early 1990s, 60% or more of U.S. adults said this was the case more Crime nationwide than the year before. Interestingly, local experiences with crime do not have a major impact on this perception. In every Gallup crime poll conducted since the 1990s, Americans are less likely to say crime is increasing in their area than the country as a whole.

This year is no exception. Many Americans are convinced that violent crime is on the rise.

What drives this misperception?

For more than a century, local news stories have covered violent crime extensively because they captivate and hold the attention of their audiences—and attention drives advertising revenue. Social media can nationalize a local news story in minutes.

In election years, politicians, their campaign staff and supporters try to influence public perceptions about everything from the economy to violent crime. Some try to scare people into voting for them. During the 1988 presidential campaign, George HW Bush ran an ad against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis that featured a criminal named Willie Horton. Not only did it help Bush 41 win; It ultimately changed America's approach to criminal justice.

Disinformation, a topic I have been studying in recent months, has taken both practices to a new level. Now an assertion does not have to be factually anchored. When state and local officials angrily denied that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating people's pets, JD Vance responded: “If I have to make up stories so that the American media will actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I do.” “I will do that.”

Venezuelan gangs did not overrun Aurora, Colorado. It's a beautiful community. In fact, researchers have repeatedly found that immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans. For example, a study from 2020 that was published in the renowned journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which verifies and records the immigration status of all people arrested in the state, to examine felony arrest rates across different groups. The researchers found that undocumented immigrants were significantly affected lower Arrest Rates Compared to Legal Immigrants and Native-born U.S. Citizens.

Recently, a 2024 study conducted by a multi-university team analyzed 150 years of US Census data. It found that immigrants were consistently less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States during this period. Beginning in 1960, the incarceration gap widened, such that immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the United States.

Weaponize data

Some claims are more difficult to verify than others, particularly when large segments of the public have been persuaded to distrust reputable sources of information. Studies that distort published statistics to reach a different conclusion are particularly difficult for laypeople to spot. Here is one such example. Real Clear Investigations published an analysis on October 16 titled “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revamps Violent Crime Statistics.” Within hours, Fox News amplified the story with a highly politicized headline: “FBI Quietly Updates Crime Data, to show a sharp rise in violence under the Biden-Harris administration: 'Shocking.'” From there, it went viral. A supportive post from Elon Musk on X has been viewed more than 50 million times.

Experts quickly identified several problems with Real Clear's analysis. First, the FBI regularly updates data from previous years, so revisions are not unexpected or suggestive of bias. Second, around the same time, the FBI revised its 2022 crime numbers slightly upward lowered The year 2021 is counting. This increased the shift in crime from one year to the next.

However, knowledgeable criminologists believe the 2021 data is unreliable because the FBI changed its reporting system this year. Additionally, only about 65% of the country was covered by participating law enforcement agencies this year. The other 35%, including large jurisdictions such as New York and Los Angeles, did not submit data. These challenges and the stress of the pandemic led to great uncertainty in the 2021 numbers.

Since 2021, our country has overcome COVID-19 and law enforcement data reporting has improved significantly. This means that the figures reported for 2023 are not only more reliable, they also paint an encouraging picture.

Crime has declined, particularly homicides

According to the FBI, violent crime fell about 3% overall in 2023 compared to 2022. More notably, murders fell by nearly 12%, marking the largest single-year decline in the past 20 years. Jeff Asher, a well-known crime data analyst, recently noted that other data sources, including NORC's Live Crime Tracker, the Real-Time Crime Index, the CDC and the Gun Violence Archive, point in the same direction.

Why is this important?

According to a Gallup poll released Oct. 9, three out of four voters think crime is an “extremely” or “very important” issue. In a presidential election as close as this one, their decisions should be based on fact, not fiction.